April Fool's Valediction
by OrangeChocolate
Summary: The first time they meet again, he holds up her painting against the backdrop of blood, bombs, and tears./She only puts to canvas what he brings to death. SasukexSakura.


_**I know**__: "April Fool's Day isn't for cynically tragic stories." However, it's probably the only one of its kinds you're gonna get today, so enjoy---Believe it!_

**Disclaimer**: I do not own Naruto. Yet.

**Note**: Since I'm such a freaking fan, read as SasuSaku if you wish to.

_**April Fool's Valediction**_

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"_Art is dangerous."_

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She doesn't need an alarm clock to wake her up. She simply swings her legs off the bed, slips into her red dress, and smoothes out her matted hair.

This is her routine.

As she empties out her weapon pouch haphazardly today, her eyes sweep the view outside her window. She knows, for it has always been ingrained to her to _know_, that the gentle sessions of warm rain each year give rise to fragrant May wildflowers without fail.

She fills her pouch with paints, as is her routine, and her hand momentarily smoothes over something bristly. As her fingers pack up a brush from Sai, she briefly wonders what flowers this year's showers would create.

After all, blood only gives rise to more blood.

* * *

At the gates of the graveyard she stops. She stoops down, positioning her canvas with the ease of experience and mixing her paints. The paints are old and the canvas is rough, but during wartime nothing besides kunai and jutsu is made with precision anyway.

To her left, four Sound headbands are littered on the ground, ensconced with dirt and crowned with lost honor. Two Konoha headbands are on her right. As she lifts her brush to cotton, she thinks of her own headband lying across her bathroom shelf. If there were two things that she had learned from Sai before his name appeared on stone, it was that Sasuke declared attack on Konoha and that art and politics don't mix. They had both long been proven right, but she will no longer fight.

Sakura makes herself comfortable, and paints.

* * *

Before she packs up for the day, she looks at her creation and thinks.

Some would call the scene in front of her a memorial site, and in this way she can distinguish the naïve from the jaded. No one wants to remember war once they have seen death. She wisely calls it a graveyard.

Her memories of Kakashi had been especially potent lately, and a part of his gravestone overlapped Sai's smaller one. As always, Ino's stone was painted with a lighter shade than those surrounding it-- a fair girl forever encompassed in darkness. She had rounded Lee's gravestone with her brush, and in detached respect, added a few gray feathers on top of Neji's.

Even though the Rokudaime's commemoration statue had been shrouded by thousands of nameless heroes and blurred out by the morning fog, she had brought Naruto's large gravestone to the front-left part of her painting. She figured with a sigh that at least the symbolism counted for something, and the absence of its shadow created a stark juxtaposition with the tombstone in the center.

She throws her paints back into her weapon pouch and grips the side of her completed canvas. She thinks of the black and red tombstone in the center of her canvas, and wonders where in Konoha this Sasuke is now, and how many more Sound troops he will lead to their deaths.

* * *

Sakura finds haven in routines, no matter however many times Iruka Sensei repeated that _a good shinobi should never indulge in such a weakness_. She figured that any lesson from the academy book could go out the window, when such a circumstance arose that she fully trusted _Sound's bombs_ to wake her up dutifully and daily before dawn.

* * *

It's funny, she briefly thinks as she glimpses at a huddled girl in the alleyway, how many more kunai she could have purchased with the peace prize money she won.

_Little girl, this is War that no academy could ever teach to you._

* * *

She leaves her door open as she set her paints back onto the shelf.

She turns back around,

and there is Sasuke, poised at her door.

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He looks at her wordlessly for a moment, for this is their first reunion since he recruited rogue Sound ninjas and declared War on Konoha. She only stares back, noting how much more beautiful and twisted he has become, wondering why he hasn't sought her out yet, in this small village. She lets out a weary laugh at this anticlimactic reunion.

Wondering if this is her end.

He simply lifts his hand, the one not clutching a bloody katana, she notes with relief.

Then she realizes that he is presenting to her one of her own paintings, from when the cynical bombings of her village had just begun. _Konoha_, she had titled it, after she had put her own reflection of the horror into colors and shapes. It had been on public display for weeks under the vain hope that it would somehow end the atrocity. She had signed her name unmistakably at the corner.

"Did you do this?" He spoke simply.

He took no step forward, yet no step backward. His face betrayed no emotion and reflected none of the mercy that his victims undoubtedly begged for, yet he made no move to activate the Sharingan in her presence. He was a living paradox, powerful yet misunderstood.

_I did,_ she wants to say, like a mother speaking to a child, _but you have no clue what you are asking. _

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She remembers Naruto's unabashed gape when she withdrew from the shinobi force.

_But Sakura-chan, we need you! The war needs you, and Sasuke needs you!_

_You can show people by blood,_ she had lectured, _but I'm going to find a peaceful way to fight this war._ Looking into Naruto's baffled eyes, she saw her mirrored confusion and realized she didn't fully comprehend those words either.

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She looks past his shoulder, at his troops sharpening their kunai and polishing their bombs, readying for another round tomorrow.

Then she looks him straight in the eye.

"No, Sasuke. You did."

_If only it was April Fool's Day._

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"_Ireland has her madness and her weather still__**/**_

_For poetry makes nothing happen."_

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_**fin**_

**Finished: 4/1/10 3:05 PM**

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**Happy April Fool's Day! Don't ask me why I titled this piece the way I did. I have no clue.**

**Based off of an anecdote I read about the painting **_**Guernica**_** by Picasso, done during the Spanish Civil War.**

**Also, Special thanks to **_**ProBowler, red lips and cloudy eyes, redriver1311, SasuSaku Forever and Ever,**_** and **_**NuclearPandaGas**_** for making me smile yesterday! :) **

**Reviews are always welcome,**

_**OrangeChocolate**_


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